Faster Hosting Launched for Everyone & User Generated Content + Leaderboard Success
Scrolller Weekly Update November 5th, 2021
Intro
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlights are faster hosting for everyone, success of the leaderboard, and improvements in user experience metrics.
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User Highlights
Our users share their love for scrolller by sharing their feedback about our service and by being open about their pain points. As a company with User-Driven Development Focus, we welcome this feedback and make sure to prioritize this.
User Feedback
This week's user highlight goes to "DANE". The user feedback is as follows:
First, I'd suggest adding an additional keybinding on the right side of the keyboard to favorite content. On the left side you can easily hit “F” as you are scrolling all with one hand. However, if your using <—> keys there is no quick hotkey to favorite content. I’d recommend making Up and down arrows toggle favorite in addition to the "F" key. (This would also be beneficial for anyone who’s left handed and uses Scrolller for NSFW)
Second, it comes off kinda confusing that you "follow" subs and users, but you "like" shared collections, when they all end up in the same "+ following" tab A uniform term might make it a bit less ambiguous but idk
Also when you hit "hide information" it only hides the bottom half of the UI. It'd be awesome for it to hide the entire UI
And one other thing I noticed, currently you can't see the titles of the top 3 collections on the leaderboard. It only shows the creator name and nothing else.
Scrolller's Action
"DANE" We really appreciate you taking some time out to describe your pain points to us. The way you communicated these issues clearly communicates the success criteria. Here at Scrolller, we think these are some really great suggestions. We believe that adding these small features will increase the quality of the user experience for our power users.
We would like you to know that we have started to prioritize these updates. You will be able to see these updates in near future live on Scrolller.
If you would like to share any feature feedback and contributions, don't hesitate to let us know. We greatly appreciate you taking valuable time to offer us feedback and support us on this journey towards building Scrolller.
Go Here to help us with Scrolller Features testing.
User Experience
292886 → 298474
User Accounts Growth
Leaderboard Success:
The launch of the leaderboard has received an overwhelming response from our users. They are not only loving the leaderboard but are creating new collections to show the world what they like. The growth we have seen in user-generated collections proves that we are on right track. It is also contributing to user account creation as we can see a clear uplift in the account creation graph right after its launch. The graph shows a sudden spike in generation of user-generated collection right after the launch of LeaderBoard.
Users are actively engaging with user-generated collections and following them at a rapid pace. This will also help us to understand which sort of content the majority of users like. We can utilize this important information for improving content on Scrolller by following actions.
Populate more content on Scrolller which our users like to engage with.
Remove less engaging content from Scrolller to improve the quality of overall content on Scrolller.
The sudden spike shows the exponential growth we saw in the following user-generated collections is shown in the following graph.
Claim Premium Hosting for Free:
For our top 100 users on the leaderboard, Scrolller is rewarding them with 1 month of premium hosting for free. So far 11 users have claimed the premium hosting. People will be able to see a popup when they login to their account if they qualify for a free premium.
Leaderboard as Discovery Feature: We are now working on transforming our leaderboard as more of a discovery feature for user-generated collections. We are brainstorming various ideas on how this can be achieved. Our Ui/Ux expert is now generating various mockups that will help us understand visually what our user experience would look like. Some basic ideas we came up with are as follows
Improve UI of the leaderboard to display a slide show of content inside a user-generated collection.
Create a new page with Editor Picks. Boost most engaging user-generated collections.
Add user-generated collections on the search page. Allow users to switch between searching from user-generated collections or Scrolller collections.
In the next newsletter, we will share some designs for this discovery feature. If you see any errors while using this page, please reach out to us. Our development team will fix it on a priority basis.
Unlocking Categories Page:
Now that our SFW categories page is launched our team is actively working on removing the account lock from the categories page. It will allow our users to use this feature without creating an account on the Scrolller. Previously when we unlocked the categories page we saw a massive drop in user account creation. This time we are unlocking the categories page with limited options. It will allow our users to enjoy a basic version of the categories page but to use the page to its full capability, they will need to create an account. We believe by doing this we will be able to provide our users with a great experience and it will also not create any negative impact on the user account creation.
WDSLL for unlocking categories page is as follows:
Provide our users with a great users experience. We will be able to measure the increase in the quality of user experience by our user experience metrics.
Decreased bounce rate on Scrolller.
Turning off Old Scrolller
The old scrolller was turned off this week. We saw a backlash from the old Scrolller community that believes that Scrolller is now much more complex. They loved the simplest version of it. We are working on all of those feedbacks, making sure we provide that user base with an even better user experience than they enjoyed on the older version.
User Experience
User Experience Metrics
The deeper we started to investigate the user experience metrics, the more we learned about what a good user experience actually looks like on Scrolller. This changed the direction of our priorities completely as we want to focus on providing our users with the best user experience first. our goal is to make Scrolller a go-to place for every content lover on the globe.
Scrolller team is fully focused on improving the website for our users. Our top priorities are now removing unnecessary complexity, Improving communication with users, faster loading times, and incentivizing users for their effort on Scrolller.
This week we improved the performance of our hosting servers. This directly resulted in faster loading of content on Scrolller. We saw an immediate response on our user experience metrics.
Average Session Duration
Our Average session duration for the past month was 08 minutes 12 seconds.
After providing our users with the improved performance on Scrolller we saw that the average session duration increased to 08 Minutes 28 seconds.
The increase of 14 seconds might not seem very large. But when we apply this 14 second time increase to our 7 million monthly active users. It becomes 27,222 additional hours spent on Scrolller per month.
As we are working on improving our service more, the average session duration we are aiming for Scrolller is 15 minutes.
Average Bounce Rate
Our average bounce rate last month was 16.65%.
After an improvement in our performance, we saw a good improvement in bounce rate.
This month our average bounce rate has dropped down to 15.07%
Our target is to reduce our bounce rate below 10%.
Average Time for User to Subscribe Premium
In the month of September, on average a user on Scrolller subscribed to premium after using the site for ~55 minutes.
In the month of October, this time is nearly halved as we saw that on average a user is now subscribing to premium after using the site for ~29 minutes.
This important metric gives us an idea of how people are interacting with scrolller and if they are liking the service enough to buy a premium subscription.
Our target is to reduce this time down to < 10 minutes.
Mean Content load time
Scrolller is working on gathering this important metric from our users worldwide. This will give us a clear idea of where we stand on our user experience scale in various geographical areas in the world.
Good User Experience: < 1-second Average User Experience: 1 second to 2 seconds Bad User Experience: >2 Seconds
Our target is to provide a homogenous quality experience in every country that we have visitors from.
Metrics Under Investigation:
Most viewed pages
The average number of errors on page
The volume of new content added to Scrolller each day
Average time for the user to create an account
Average time for users to subscribe to premium
These necessary metrics are creating a nice base benchmark for our current user experience on Scrolller which will let us easily track the improvement by comparing the new values with them.
Please let us know what you think about these user metrics. If you have any metrics that might be a good measure of user experience, we would love to know more.
User Experience Issues - Resolved:
Remove Empty Collections from Scrolller.
Prevents users from accessing the subreddits with <10 posts.
"Slow Down" issue on login while using Autofill / Password manager
Refreshing Tabs on Login and Logout to ensure consistency.
Leaderboard Podium Links redirecting to the same URL
The whole Column stops loading on Front end.
Roadmap for Growth for User Accounts
Unlocking Categories plan (In Progress)
Recording User Experience Metrics (In Progress)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Pro-Metric Advertising (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
SFW Categories (Completed)
Scrolller Extension and Enhancements (Blocked)
Revenue
Faster Hosting, For Everyone:
Faster Hosting Test With Scrolller Users:
In order to stress test our faster-hosting setup, we moved all of our user bases on Scrolller to a new server. This allowed us to test our infrastructure at peak load. Scrolller is now serving content at a fast rate to all of our users as our solution to faster hosting worked.
To provide an ultimate experience to our users, we have decided to make faster hosting available to everyone. In our test, we found that this new hosting setup has increased the quality of user experience tremendously, as mean content load time has dropped by almost 175%.
Lightning-Fast Hosting for Premium Users Coming Soon!
Now that we have decided to provide faster hosting to all of our users. For our premium users, we are now working on the Lightning Fast Scrolller experience. Our premium users will be able to not only enjoy the content they love without any lag but also we are working on providing them with a feature to bulk download their favorite content.
We want to do that by setting up a global CDN for our premium users. Our team is currently finding the cost of providing such CDN for our premium users. This will allow us to cache the content and serve it to our premium users at lightning speeds.
Problems With OVH
Disruption of Service
This week we faced a huge disruption of service that lasted 48 hours. OVH (our current hosting provider) blocked our 2 out of 3 storage servers on a bogus request that we are serving pedophilic content. Abuse department from OVH without any confirmation that whether the content in question is really pedophilic content, decided to block and shutdown our hosts.
This situation caused content to break on scrolller and our site become very slow and laggy. Scrolller tried to reach out to OVH regarding this issue and found out that they have the worst customer service. They didn't know how to contact their own internal department for any sort of help.
After numerous hours spent calling their customer service, Emailing them, and trying to contact their abuse department we found out that there is no way the abuse department can be contacted.
After 48 hours our host servers were unblocked. But it gave Scrolller a clear motive to move its services to some other hosting provider which have better customer support.
Plan for New Hosting Infrastructure:
Since Scrolller has started to look for other hosting providers, We have an opportunity to globally distribute our host servers. Reducing the distance between the user and the host will result in an even better scrolller experience as content load times will dramatically reduce.
We are thinking about the following Infrastructure for our move.
Managed Dedicated Servers in Portland, USA West
2 Content Host Servers
1 Cache Server
Managed Dedicated Servers in Frankfurt, Germany
2 Content Host Servers
1 Cache Server
We are looking for an experienced person that might be able to guide us on our global distribution. This will be a big and very expensive move for scrolller, but it will decrease the content load time globally for our users.
If you think you know someone that might be able to advise us on our new infrastructure, please send us their contact details. We want to take our time and do this right with proper guidance.
Plan for Making Scrolller Resilient
After the incident with OVH, Our development team is actively working on making Scrolller more resilient. The team is now working on creating a script that will allow us to check which hosts are available. Scrolller will continue to serve data only from that server. This will allow us to pull out any host server for maintenance without disrupting any service.
Globally distributing our servers will also help with resiliency. Target is to provide our users with the best experience even when multiple host servers are down.
Roadmap for Growth in Revenue
Faster Hosting for Premium Users (Testing)
Monetization Optimisations (In Progress)
Multiple Payment Processors (Design Stage)
Bitcoin
Paypal
High-Risk Payment Processor
Exclusive Features for Premium User (Design Stage)
Social Traffic
Outreach Team Update
Our outreach team didn't manage to get a viral post for this week, and our Facebook Page experienced a decrease in the amount of engagement & traffic it had compared to last week, where one of the posts they made was having promising results. Right now, there's some encouraging intel that tells our outreach team that we are still getting traffic from the Facebook social front, as you can't depend on a post to go viral to reach success.
Despite this being promising, the outreach team lost a social media manager, as this person decided without prior notice to find another way far from the Scrolller team. Since this was unexpected, the workflow is probably going to be affected for at least a week as someone comes to replace the role. So we are now hiring!
Social Traffic Update:
Our overall traffic from social media channels to the website is still dropping a little bit this week. Even so, traffic coming from Twitter raised up to fight with the Facebook decrease.
Total Social Sessions 14,396 → 11,888
FB & TW Sessions 3,488 → 3,328 (4,5% decrease)
Currently, our team started to experiment with other methods of engagement on Twitter, which are giving promising results for both mid and long-term strategies.
NSFW Content
Our outreach team is now working with NSFW content, as this was already engaging users on our website, they thought it was a good idea to move on to social platforms.
Right now, the team decided to open NSFW channels on Twitter, where this kind of content has large communities & accounts dedicated to it. So far, people seem to be much more engaged with the content that is already trending in Scrolller, compared to SFW content the team was posting on our previous platforms.
The results are talking themselves; we had a spike in Twitter traffic for this week.
Reddit, maybe?
Our outreach team keeps developing the tools needed to run tests on Reddit, to check if our content could be engaging to people on this platform; or if it exists the chance of opening a Scrolller subreddit, as some of our premium users suggested.
So far, the team considers:
Reddit has lots of NSFW communities
This could help them reach the traffic goal
It's important to try new methods to accomplish outreach
Would you like a Scrolller subreddit? Tell us in the comments!
Follow us to not miss anything: 🔘 Instagram 🔘 Facebook 🔘 Twitter
Thank you for being our fans and followers on social media.
Do let us know anywhere if you have strategies that have worked for you on social media or have any valuable feedback so we can learn from them. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Roadmap for Growth in Social Traffic
Hashtag experiment (Done)
Implementing Reddit (In Progress)
CTA Test (In Progress)
User Generated Collections: Create and share your favorites and follows (In Progress)
Team Highlights
Team Updates
Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!
Nick — Working on exclusive features for premium users so that Scrolller can take some cash out of our users pockets. Have some extra cash? Buy premium subscription on Scrolller.
Mannan — Pulling his hairs thinking about how he can make Scrolller better for everyone around the globe. Also thinking about investing in a stock that might make him richest man over night. Not gonna happen brother, Not in this life!!!
Karol — Working on making Scrolller resilient and fail safe so he don't have to pull all nighters at work when service is down. Had to do dishes for whole week as he didn't gave proper time to his GF while working whole nights on Scrolller. We feel you brother!
Valentin — Earning some good money while enjoying wacthing NSFW content and sharing it with other users on different platforms. What a dream job for any teenager out there!!
Tim — Thinking about how he can read minds of our users to show them exactly what they like to see on Scrolller. Telepathy might work for this cause.
Matt — Finding a plug for a hole in his nose while providing us with some system performance analysis & metrics. Need to fix this hole fiasco before it transforms into blackhole and engulf our data scientist.
Chris — Eagerly waiting for the time when he will be celebrating success of Scrolller with his wife on a beautiful beach in Hawaii, watching sunset with a glass of wine in hand.
Have any feedback for us? Don't hesitate to share it with us in the comments sections. We like hearing any feedback you have for us.
Road Map
You can share feedback with us about any of the new features below. Using this Airtable Form. Looking forward to your comments
This week
Faster Hosting for Premium Users (Testing)
Exclusive Features for premium users (In Progress)
Content Recommendation System (In Progress)
Monetization Update and Optimization (In Progress)
Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Blocked)
New native advertisements (Done)
Categories page for SFW collections (Done)
User Generated Collections: Leaderboard(Done)
P.S. As a reminder, subscribe to our newsletter if you are yet to walk with us on this Building Scrolller exciting yet challenging journey.
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Until next time, happy scrollling!